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Abstract Expressionist Robot Paints His Feelings For You

We’ve shown you plenty of drawing robots and machines in the past, and last week we showed you the abstract expressionist-influenced generative art of Jeremy Rotstzain. Today, artist Benjamin Grosser offers up a mash-up of these two micro-trends and takes it another step further with his Franz Kline wannabe painting machine, which uses AI to listen to its environment and process that information to influence what it paints. Overall a much nicer, more cultured use of artificial intelligence than, say, a swarm of flying death robots.

Ok, so the bot is no De Kooning, we know, but it’s still pretty impressive. And just think—he’s only starting out, so he’s likely to get better. Quite amusingly, on his site Grosser admits that “Lately I’ve taken to critiquing the machine as it paints, giving it audio input that is a direct response to what it just did. I’ll tell it what I think of each gesture it paints: if I liked it or didn’t, if I think it should have done something different, or how I see the latest mark fitting into the overall composition of the work. I’ve found that I tend to dislike these paintings more than others it makes, suggesting that listening to a constant critique of one’s creative process may not be productive.”

Perhaps there’s something there for the art critics of the world to mull over…

You can see the installation in action above and below is a selection of what the robot has painted, which is, in truth, some pretty terrible, abstract stuff.